Montreal West and Cote St. Luc are having a rain barrel sale! This is an amazing opportunity to buy a rain barrel at prices much lower than those in stores.

Rain barrels are an excellent way to save valuable rainwater for many summer activities such as watering plants or washing the car. While rainwater is not potable, it is perfectly good for these activities and prevents wasting potable water. With a rain barrel you will save money on your water bill, as well as do your part for the environment.

Rain barrels often are sold for at least 90 dollars, but we are selling ours for only 45 dollars for Montreal West or Cote St. Luc residents and 55 dollars for everyone else.

To purchase your rain barrel, go to the website rainbarrel.ca/montreal, where you can order you rain barrel to be picked up on July 31st, 2011 at the Montreal West arena. You have the option of either paying online now with credit or debit card, or paying on the day of pickup with cash.

Thanks for doing your part!

Wow. This could be a game changer, if true.

The debate has always been: can shale gas be safely extracted from the Earth without poisoning drinking water? For more on that debate, see: Gasland the Movie.

The debate was never if this was a profitable business, until now…

Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Money is pouring in” from investors even though shale gas is “inherently unprofitable,” an analyst from PNC Wealth Management, an investment company, wrote to a contractor in a February e-mail. “Reminds you of dot-coms.”

“The word in the world of independents is that the shale plays are just giant Ponzi schemes and the economics just do not work,” an analyst from IHS Drilling Data, an energy research company, wrote in an e-mail on Aug. 28, 2009.

Company data for more than 10,000 wells in three major shale gas formations raise further questions about the industry’s prospects. There is undoubtedly a vast amount of gas in the formations. The question remains how affordably it can be extracted.

2011 Vermont Permaculture Design Course

Utilizing the incomparable Whole Systems Research Farm permaculture site in Vermont’s Mad River Valley, our design studio resources, and a team of leading facilitators, Whole Systems Design, Keith Morris and Lisa DePiano present the first of many permaculture design courses to be offered in the coming decades.  This certification course will be held July 31st to August 12th, 2011 at the Whole Systems Design Studio and Research Farm site. 

This course offers an unparalleled opportunity to gain hands-on applied permaculture skills immersed within one of North America’s most diverse and intensive permaculture research sites.  Participants will engage with high-performance home and community resource systems that will be more resilient in the face of problems posed by peak oil, climate change, environmental toxicity, and the inability of existing economic and social systems to deal with such challenges.

This course includes the standard certificate curriculum but goes way beyond the typical Designer’s Certification Course by utilizing the background of skills-based trainings offered in Whole Systems Skills, and information-based study.  Students in this course will not walk and is filled with practice-based, learning-by-doing experiences, not only concept away from the experience without basic post-peak oil resiliency literacy including: how to plant a tree, fell a tree, split firewood, harvest biomass with a sycthe and sharpen it, sharpen and maintain other basic tools, perform earthworks, plumb basic waterworks and harvest water, inoculate mushroom logs and spread mushroom patches and innumerable other hard skills available to us via our working homestead, farm and practitioner-teachers.

Unlike at many permaculture course, we will actually be practicing these techniques on the farm throughout the course.

Course Highlights

• Immersion and practice in one of the most sophisticated permaculture sites in North America.

• Living at a beautiful site in the heart of Vermont, in the Mad River Valley.  See more here.
  

• Ecological design and engineering pioneer John Todd anchors a team of guest instructors and visiting presenters.
  

• Field trips to regional sites to see models of permaculture strategies in action.

There will be a first-come-first-served opportunity for a 3 day applied permaculture practicum after the course where a small group of course students will have the opportunity to practice permaculture all day, each day, on the research farm site.

Course Instructors

Keith Morris – Propect Rock Permaculture

Lisa DePiano – Montview Neighborhood Farm

Ben Falk, M.A.L.D. - Whole Systems Design

Cornelius Murphy – Whole Systems Design

To learn more and register for a place in the course, please visit our website.

The NDG Food Depot and the Montréal Permaculture Guild invite you to a free evening with Claude William Genest, on Wednesday April 20^th at 7pm at the NDG Food Depot (2120 Oxford Ave).

Mr. Genest, permaculturalist and former Deputy Leader of the Green Party of Canada, will present a selection of episodes from his PBS produced Emmy nominated television-series “Regeneration – The Art of Sustainable Living.”  “Regeneration…” follows Mr. Genest as he explores the ways innovative people all over the world are building, growing, and living more sustainably.  The screening will be followed by a discussion led by Mr. Genest about his experiences with the project.

You can watch past TV episodes that cover topics like:

• Biological treatment systems to clean wastewater
• Local food production and the regeneration of farmers
• Permaculture to transform acres of lawn to a “multi-yielding food forest”
• Sustainable housing with straw-bale construction
• The “farm of the future,” a model for renewable energy production

Watch ReGeneration Episode #1:

Hear Professor Todd say, “The idea that you can’t have economy and ecology is complete bull!” Very inspiring stuff here. Highly recommended for anyone interested in sustainable architecture and living buildings.

Watch the full episode. See more ReGeneration.

This is a cautionary tale from Iceland for anyone in the Eastern townships considering opening up their land to natural gas “fracking”. Although I am sure many Quebecers have similar tales to tell about Hydro power.

Source: dreamland.is

How much unspoiled nature should we preserve and what do we sacrifice for clean, renewable energy? Dreamland gradually turns into a disturbing picture of corporate power taking over small communities.

Dreamland is a film about a nation standing at cross-roads. Leading up to the country’s greatest economic crisis, the government started the largest mega project in the history of Iceland, to build the biggest dam in Europe to provide Alcoa cheap electricity for an aluminum smelter in the rugged east fjords of Iceland. Today Iceland is left holding a huge dept and an uncertain future.

In Dreamland a nation with abundance of choices gradually becomes caught up in a plan to turn its wilderness and beautiful nature into a massive system of hydro-electric and geothermal power plants with dams and reservoirs. Clean energy brings in polluting industry and international corporations. It’s the dark side of green energy.

If you must own a car, this looks like a good way to keep it clean and in good shape. Few people realize that washing our cars DIY-style is one of the most unsustainable and damaging chores we can do.

Unlike household waste water that enters sewers or septic systems and undergoes treatment before it is discharged into the environment, what runs off from your car goes right into storm drains — and eventually into rivers, streams, creeks and wetlands where it poisons aquatic life and wreaks other ecosystem havoc.

Source: The Suburban (page 124)

This summer, three 20-year-old university students from NDG – Thierry Nazon, Anthony Elmaleh and Ovidiu Poienaru – put their entrepreneurial spirits to good use and started their own company – an ecological residential car wash called Biotonet.

Their system uses no soap or chemical products and consumes only five liters of water, compared to the 150-litre industry average. And they’ll do it in your driveway. All you have to do is call for an appointment.

Biotonet’s phone number: 514-903-9917

Highlights of the plan include funding for:

• more bike paths
• green promenades through the most densely populated sectors
• charging stations for electric cars
• curb-side pickup of kitchen compost for buildings with less than 8 units (sorry apartment dwellers!)

Source: Montreal Gazette

This looks like an authentic, non-corporate version of An Inconvenient Truth which always seemed to me less like a plea to rein in the culture of consumption and more like a big advertisement for carbon taxes.

Force of Nature, a documentary about Canadian scientist and environmentalist David Suzuki, opens Friday at the AMC Forum.

Source: Globe and Mail

“…This documentary about (Suzuki’s) life could be the most persuasive argument yet that saving the environment is the most critical fight for human rights occurring today. Without clean water and air, as Suzuki says, we are not only destroying the environment; we are destroying us. The speech can indeed be compared to Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream when describing the air we breathe and the atoms we share as an irrefutable commonality – a bond with the past, present and our children’s future.“

Update Sept 15: Quebec won’t halt shale-gas work

If anyone has the slightest idea that drilling for natural gas trapped in shale rock 1,000+ meters below the Earth is safe or sustainable, please watch the documentary film Gasland, which premiered on HBO a few days ago.

From the film, you clearly see that drilling for shale gas destroys any livable space around it. Kills it. Pollutes it. Wastes it.

You can’t live there. You can’t farm there. And you certainly can’t drink the water as evidenced by the many cases of tap water being lit on fire. That’s right – tap water – that burns.

We Quebecers are right to stop this shale gas drilling. If the drilling is allowed to occur, it will destroy the land which has already occurred far too often south of the border.

The broader question, of course, which this article fails to address is: how will Quebec or anyone else get natural gas in the future? The challenging truth is that, like petroleum oil, the easy-to-find natural gas has been found and burned.

Now what? Will we destroy our natural resources (air, land and water) just to extract and burn the last available bubbles of natural gas? It’s insane and it looks like the road we’re on unless we stop it.

Source: Globe and Mail

Thousands of metres beneath Quebec’s fertile and heavily populated St. Lawrence River valley, geologists believe up to 50 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves may be locked in hard shale. The rough preliminary estimate would place the field on a short list of the largest of its kind in Canada.

Before Quebec has even drafted its first oil-and-gas law to regulate the industry, exploration companies have obtained 600 permits and are drilling a half dozen wells to test the viability of Quebec’s gas reserves.

Shale gas would be the first major foray into fossil fuels in a province where the industry mainly pierces public consciousness for high prices at the pump, pollution, greenhouse gases or some distant environmental disaster…

At Sunday’s unveiling of the province’s plan, Mr. Arcand and Ms. Normandeau were booed and shouted down by several dozen protesters. An aide was forced to plead for calm and respect.

“Citizens have expressed their concerns, and we’ve heard them,” Ms. Normandeau said over a chorus of catcalls. “We have the responsibility to exploit such potential wealth … but we will be putting primary emphasis on the environment and on ensuring the social acceptance of any development.”

Many of the protesters were residents of Saint-Marc-sur-Richelieu, a small town about a 40-minute drive south of Montreal, where a mix of recently landed commuters and farmers have successfully stalled an early attempt at exploration by an Australian company.

Pierre Batellier, a university lecturer and leader of the local anti-drilling movement, said the town’s 2,000 residents are divided between people who welcome lease payments from drilling companies and other potential economic development and those who say Quebec is rushing into the unknown.

“There’s not a lot of tension in town, but it’s starting to grow as houses become harder to sell,” said Mr. Batellier, who teaches sustainable development at HEC Montréal, a business school.

Any oil and gas exploration would likely cause controversy in Quebec, but the “unconventional” methods used to reach shale gas promise to fuel opposition.

Exploration companies reach the gas through a recent innovation in drilling known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Thousands of litres of water, sand and chemicals are blasted into the rock to break it up and release the gas.

Several communities in Pennsylvania, where drilling is running a frenetic pace, have complained of severe water contamination while New York state has put a hold on drilling. The industry insists the problems are isolated.

Quebec environmental groups and municipal associations have asked for a moratorium on drilling until more questions are answered.

The Quebec Oil and Gas Association – created just last year and led by former Hydro-Québec president André Caillé – has predicted the industry could create thousands of jobs and drive down the price of natural gas, which is nearly twice as expensive in Quebec as it is in Alberta.

The province and industry have promised a major public-relations campaign this fall to tout the benefits of gas exploration while environmental groups say they will mobilize opposition.

The Montreal Nature museums (Insectarium, Botanical Garden, Biodôme and Planetarium) will stop selling bottled water in their gift stores. It takes more than 47 million gallons of oil to produce plastic water bottles for Americans every year. Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. (source: Food and Water Watch)

Plastic water bottles are rarely recycled and often end up in landfill or floating in the vast ocean waste stream killing fish.

Finally, plastic bottles are unhealthy for humans. They leach chemicals into the water that you drink leading to hormone disfunction or even cancer.

Stainless steel water bottles are a solution. The best one I found is made of surgical grade stainless steel, the highest quality available. It also comes in a backpacker-style wide-mouth design that I love. It is big and holds 38oz of liquid.

If you’re worried about the “carbon consequences” from buying a steel bottle, the manufacturer, Guyot Designs, has a program called C-Minus where they offset the carbon emitted from making the bottle. Every bottle they produce carries 100lbs of verified green house gas emissions reductions – making their bottles not just carbon neutral, but carbon negative!

Other highlights:

• Fair labor and fair wages were used in making this product.
• It’s 100% recyclable.
• Dishwasher safe.
• Lifetime warranty.